Comparing with worldwide average of 30 percent, Taiwan's current forest coverage is 58.8 percent that Taiwan is a country with rich forest resources. Forest is considered to be the most massive, complicated, versatile, functional and beneficial ecosystem on Earth that a healthy forest can be the most important stable factor for any biosphere in water catchment area protection, soil erosion protection, environmental filtration/beautification, regional climate control and natural disaster reduction, and so on.
In the forests growing in the Taiwan's mountain areas, there are many indigenous tree species of high economic value, such as juniper, fir and teak. As most of the forests in Taiwan is owned and managed by the government and as those precious trees are spreading within Taiwan's vast mountain reserve, forest management performed only by personnel of Taiwan Forest Bureau can be a very difficult task and thus illegal logging are often heard.
Except for illegal logging, with the rapid progress in biotechnology, many scarce indigenous forest resources such as antrodia camphorata and glossy ganoderma that are raw materials for modern medication are also in danger of being exhausted by some illegal means. For instance, those lawless person can cut down a precious hundred-year-old cinnamomum kanehirai hay just for harvesting the antrodia camphorata growing thereon. Such behavior not only will damage the forest's ecosystem, but also will eventually exhausting all the forest resources along with the forest itself.
Current forest management methods adopted in Taiwan Forest Bureau for preventing illegal logging and harvesting forest resources rely on the management staff to work in shift, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and to ambush at the site of illegal logging/harvesting while setting up inspecting posts to intercept the trafficking of illegal goods. However, such method not only may consume and waste many manpower and money, but also it still can neither provide instant protection against those illegal acts, nor can it provides sufficient evidences to nail those lawless persons.
There are already some techniques for improving such disadvantages. One such technique is a forestry management system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,100,817. The aforesaid system involves a forestry management process that comprises inserting at least one passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, e.g. one at the tree trump and one at the root, that has a frequency capable of being read by a scanner into a tree, then scanning the tag. Tags that are inserted into trees may be scanned and associated with specific information concerning the owner, the tree, the area or other aspects of forestry, land and environmental management. In addition, the scanner may be hand-held, or mounted on a car, or fixed stationed at a specific location, and it may also be linked to a GPS system.
Another such technique is a method for tracking silvicultural information disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,888,458, which use at least one RFID tag, being disposed proximate to a tree, for tracking silvicultural information during the product cycle of the tree, such as those information can be used to promote efficient tree cultivation, e.g. cultivation, location, hardness, harvesting, processing, and/or properties of the tree, and providing this information to a computer to be stored.
Although all the aforesaid prior-arts involving the inserting of at least one RFID tag into a tree, they all are only capable of obtaining silvicultural information of the tree in a passive manner. That is, the information obtained by the aforesaid techniques can only be known while being assessed and they are not able to actively inform the management staff if there is any abnormality for enabling the management staff to aware the abnormality in real time.